


Frosting

by HyperchaoticStarlight (MVPYurio)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Autistic Keith (Voltron), Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Fluff and Angst, Keith Centered, Minor Character Death, Multi, Original Character Death(s), Polyamorous relationship, Sad Keith (Voltron), introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 10:38:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11160177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MVPYurio/pseuds/HyperchaoticStarlight
Summary: Keith likes cake, but he can't stand frosting.





	Frosting

**Author's Note:**

> Before we begin, some thank you's to the people who helped me with this one...
> 
> ~ [Ciel](https://starryklance.tumblr.com/) and [Bee](http://www.holy-triangles.tumblr.com/) for some much needed concrit late last night  
> ~ [Star](http://gaylaxystar.tumblr.com/), [Tory](https://thesaxymcclain.tumblr.com/), [Cass](http://citricsapphic.tumblr.com/), and [Rose](http://witchlightsands.tumblr.com/) for saying nice things over the course of writing this  
> ~ [Chase](https://keithsmiles.tumblr.com/) for offering to beta this morning even though ast couldn't until after I planned on posting!
> 
> Lots of love to all of you! <3

Keith likes cake, but he can't stand frosting.

Sometimes, in moderation, it’s okay—a good chocolate ganache or a cream cheese that compliments the cake nicely—but usually it's sticky and sweet and fake and there's way too much of it, and Keith has to scrape it off to get to the good part. Worse still is the layer cakes, where sticky-sweet frosting cuts in between the layers in a manner that's really just plain _wasteful._

And it's not like the frosting is necessary.

A good cake, a cake worthy of the designation “cake,” shouldn't need frosting. It should be perfectly delicious on its own, and if it's not, it’s bad cake. Plain and simple.

A lot of frosting, Keith finds, is a mark of a bad cake, a cake that tastes like nothing and has to make up for its nothingness with aesthetic and painful sweetness.

Back in the old days, before the Garrison, his birthday cake always had frosting on it, even though Keith would beg and beg and beg to have a cake without it.

“Everyone else likes frosting,” foster mother number three told him. “It's not all about you, y’know.”

So he would hear them all sing Happy Birthday and eat cake with sticky-sweet frosting, hoping and hoping and hoping for a day when he wouldn't have to swallow down something fake and brightly colored covering up a nothing reality.

~~~~

Time passes weirdly in the Castle of Lions.

Sure, they have ticks and doboshes and vargas and quintants, but as far as they relate to the rest of the universe? To Earth?

Hunk tried to keep a calendar once, but what with the length of their battles and the constant movement, the calendar quickly crumbled.

But then one day Shiro tells him that he’d been keeping track himself, and that his birthday should be coming up soon.

“You’re going to be seventeen,” he says. “How does it feel?”

Keith shrugs. “I’ve never cared much about my birthday.”

“Well, do you want to do something for it?” Shiro asks. “I’m sure everyone here would be more than happy to take a break from saving the universe and throw a party.”

“Wait, wait, did I hear what I think I heard?”

Keith whirls around to see Lance, leaning in the doorway.

“It’s almost your birthday?”

“Y-yeah,” Keith mumbles, biting his lip. If he knows his boyfriend…

“Then we’ve gotta have a party! How old are you gonna be?”

“Seventeen,” says Keith. Lance gasps. “What?”

Lance grabs a random something-or-other from a side table and holds it up to his mouth like a microphone before singing just below the top of his lungs, _“You’ll be the Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only seventeen, Dancing Queen, feel the beat from the—”_

“Lance, what the quiznak are you doing with the remote control for my particle interceptor?”

Lance stops singing and puts his makeshift microphone down. “Oh, hi Pidge. And I wasn’t doing anything with it. Why is the remote control for your whatsit sitting here, anyway?”

“It’s not a _whatsit._ It’s a particle interceptor. Don’t insult the thing that could maybe save the universe by calling it a _whatsit._ And I know you were doing something with it.”

“Fine… I was using it as a microphone. It’s almost Keith’s seventeenth birthday.”

Pidge grins. “So… he’ll be the—”

_“—Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only seventeen! Dancing Queen, feel the beat from the tambourine, you can dance, you can jive, having the time of your liiiiife…”_

“Hunk and Pidge and I used to sing this at the top of our lungs back in the Garrison,” Lance explains as Keith stares at him in confusion. “Drove Iverson apples and bananas.”

Suddenly, Hunk dashes into the room. “I heard our song. Is someone turning seventeen?”

“Keith is!” Lance exclaims, slinging an arm around his boyfriend’s shoulders and tugging him close. “And, unless he tells me no in the next two doboshes, we are having a party.”

“We can have a party,” says Keith. “Wait, do you mean party as in you invite a bunch of people, or party as in we make the Castle look pretty and just celebrate as the seven of us? Cuz I’d rather it just be us. I don’t like big crowds of people. Um. Is that okay? Oh… I’m rambling…”

Lance cups his cheek and kisses his forehead. “Whatever you want. It’s your day.”

The party is a quiet affair, just as Keith asked, just the seven of them. Really, the only extravagant part of the day is the food. Hunk, after begging Allura, Shiro, and Coran for the better part of two quintants, had been allowed to take a pod to a nearby planet and actually go shopping for what could at least vaguely resemble an Earth meal.

Unsurprisingly, he does a fantastic job, and dinner is absolutely delicious. Keith is about to open his presents when Hunk runs out of the room and seconds later returns with a cake covered in far more red candles than the standard seventeen plus one for good luck.

They sing Happy Birthday, and Keith blows out the candles (it takes multiple tries), and it’s only then that he realizes that the cake has no frosting.

“You… you didn’t frost it,” he says.

“You said once that you don’t like frosting,” Hunk replies.

Keith shoots a glance at Lance. “I said nothing,” Lance shrugs. “Hunk just remembered.”

Keith has to hold back tears. He looks from Lance to Hunk and back to Lance and then gives Lance a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. Lance walks over to Hunk and whispers something in his ear. Hunk’s eyes light up and he smiles, tangling his fingers in Lance’s. Lance leads him back over to Keith’s side.

The others stare at them in confusion. “We’re all together now,” Lance explains. “Keith and I have thought about inviting Hunk to join us for a while, but now it’s actually happening.”

Lance and Hunk stand on either side of Keith. Hunk tucks Keith under his arm and kisses the top of his head.

“Okay, that’s nice, but can we have cake?” Pidge asks impatiently.

They all laugh, and Shiro begins cutting into the cake and passing out plates.

And they eat cake without sticky-sweet frosting, and Keith doesn’t have to swallow down something fake and brightly colored covering up a nothing reality, because now his reality is full of adventures and laughter and life and love and this cake is _delicious._

~~~~

They’re on a new planet—Keith forgets the name—freeing the residents. Business as usual. The inhabitants are more violent than average, more quick-to-kill, but they don’t have the ability to take down the Galra, so Voltron joins the fray.

As it turns out, they’re less useful in their lions than they are on foot with their bayards—or, in Keith’s case, with his bayard and Blade. As it turns out, he is pretty good at using both at the same time, and he’s able to take out a good number of soldiers—especially when he has the rest of his team to cover him.

He’s on a roll with this set, one down, two down, four down, seven down, nine, eleven—and then he freezes.

“Keith? Keith, are you alright? Keith!” Lance whirls around and shoots a soldier square in the chest before he can take Keith down. “Keith? Talk to me.”

“That one there,” Keith says, pointing to a figure a couple hundred feet ahead, standing just on the edge of the fray. “Why is that one so small?”

Fourteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-two. They make their way through, taking more and more down, and Keith gets a better glimpse at the soldier in question.

“That’s. That’s a kid.”

He freezes again, staring. Lance tugs on his uniform sleeve, trying to bring him back, but Keith doesn’t respond.

And suddenly he’s running, leaving Lance and Hunk behind and in fear, and he’s running towards the small figure.

“Keith?” Allura’s voice comes through his helmet intercom. “Keith, what are you doing?”

“There’s a kid, Allura,” Keith replies. “Zarkon is making kids fight.”

He hears the familiar _ding_ that means Allura is tapping into his helmet camera—and then her gasp.

“They’re—they can’t be more than twelve years old,” she says.

Pidge’s voice breaks in. “What are you saying about twelve?”

“There’s a Galra soldier next to me,” Keith explains. “And Allura just said they look twelve years old.”

“Holy quiznak,” says Pidge. “I’ve done some research on Galra, and that’s basically like eight or nine in human years.”

“Keith, be careful,” says Shiro. “If that Galra is that young, the others have trained them. It’s unlikely that they’re some innocent child. They’ve been conditioned to kill.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re not innocent,” Keith says firmly, approaching the child.

The others watch, still fighting but simultaneously ready to act.

A few doboshes later, Keith speaks into his headset again. “Listen. This is a kid who wants nothing to do with the fight. She’s scared to death and was forced into battle. Please, we have to keep her safe.”

He can hear the hesitation on the other lines, the nervousness, but eventually Hunk is the first to speak. “You got it.”

“If Hunk’s in, I’m in,” says Lance. “We’ll keep the kid safe for you, babe.”

Keith doesn’t quite have words for how much he loves both of his boyfriends in that moment.

Thirty doboshes later, the child dies.

One of the natives shoots her before Keith can tell him no, and when Keith tells him off after the fight has been won, tells him that that was a child forced into battle and that Keith had promised to keep her safe, he doesn’t seem to care.

“A Galra is a Galra,” he says offhandedly.

Keith shoves him against a wall, holding his Marmora Blade up to the native’s face where he can see and recognize it. “I just saved your planet, and _I’m_ part-Galra,” he growls, and then he storms away.

“They’re holding a party in our honor,” Lance says when he returns, shaking. “If you don’t want to go—”

Keith shakes his head. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

Lance kisses his temple, knowing that Keith will want to talk later. Hunk laces their fingers together and they walk in as a triad behind Shiro and Pidge and Allura.

As soon as Keith walks into the giant hallway that they’ve managed to do up for a party in just two vargas, he knows he’s made a mistake. It’s too loud and too bright and there’s singing and dancing and it’s just _too much,_ and not one person is thinking about the fact that a child just died after being forced into fighting by the very ones whose temporary and prospective defeats everyone was celebrating.

He has to sit in a chair in full armor and eat food that he can’t taste, holding back tears, thinking about how he would have begged Allura to let them take the child in, keep her safe in the Castle and protect her from having to fight again, had she only _lived._

Hunk touches his leg under the table, knowing that he’s losing control.

“I never asked her name,” Keith whispers, not even sure if Hunk can hear him, but apparently he does and so does Lance, as both their faces fall and they each try to comfort him, but can’t without breaking their masks.

They won; they’re supposed to be happy.

The lights go down slightly, and suddenly everyone falls silent, staring at something on the side of the room that Keith can’t see.

“They’ve made us a cake!” Allura whispers excitedly, and indeed they have. It’s bigger than any cake that Keith has ever seen.

And it’s covered in frosting.

Keith watches as it gets cut, sees the layers upon layers of it and the frosting, sticky-sweet frosting, and it’s all brightly colored black and yellow and blue and green and red to look like the Lions, and Keith wants nothing to do with it.

How can he celebrate this victory when an innocent child died?

How can he celebrate himself when he failed in protecting her?

He feels another gentle touch on his leg—Lance’s this time—and Lance’s head gently drop against his shoulder for a split second, a silent reassurance that he knows exactly what Keith is thinking.

“We’ll talk later,” Lance whispers.

“Yeah, we will,” says Hunk, taking Keith’s hand under the table. “Promise.”

Keith knows that _talk_ won’t necessarily mean talking in this case. It might mean Keith pacing around his room screaming incoherently while the others sit side by side on his bed and listen. It may mean them holding him close while he cries. It may mean actual talking, trying to help him work through his feelings. It may mean that they sing for him, his head gently pillowed in someone’s lap. Or it may mean silence, just the three of them curled up together and Keith finding safety in having them there.

Keith will be able to decide what he wants later.

But for now, he must eat cake with sticky-sweet frosting, swallowing something fake and brightly colored covering up the grim truth of what his life has become, covering up the death of a nameless child, covering up a nothing, everything, shattering reality.

**Author's Note:**

> Personal Tumblr: [sing-a-rebel-song](https://sing-a-rebel-song.tumblr.com)  
> Voltron Tumblr: [everything-quiznaks-so-much](https://everything-quiznaks-so-much.tumblr.com)


End file.
